Lost Art Press

2 Weird Workbenches

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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A couple times a month, I get an e-mail from Mark Firley. Inside the e-mail is usually a sarcastic comment plus a link to an album of the pieces of antique furniture he photographed recently.

Firley, an active North Carolina woodworker, spends a lot of time at auctions, antique stores and in museums. And whenever possible, he takes photos of the pieces he sees, including their construction details (especially the drawer dovetails).

I have begged the guy to start a blog that contained his furniture photos. I even gave him the drop-dead perfect name for it (no, I won’t spoil it for you). He says he is close to starting a blog. If you see him, kick him in the pants for me.

(If you’ve ever taken a class with Roy Underhill then you probably have met Mark. I think he’s taken every class Roy offers.)

In any case, today Mark sent out a link to some furniture he’d spotted while in Nashville. There was some wacky stuff in the grouping – including a German piece and a very very late campaign chest.

But what caught my eye were the two wackiest workbench bases I have ever seen. Both of the workbenches have trestle bases. While, that’s not so unusual, what is weird are the stretcher(s) between the trestles.

One of them )above) has the widest stretcher I’ve ever seen. And part of the mondo stretcher acts as a parallel guide for the leg vise that is (wait for it) in the end-vise position. I’ve seen drawings of benches with leg vises on the end, but they are pretty rare in the wild. And this one is all kinds of crazy.

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The other workbench uses two applied stretchers to hold the spindly-est trestle legs I’ve seen on a workbench. I wonder if it is stable.

Keep it up Mark.

— Christopher Schwarz

Why I Bought a SawStop Table Saw

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If I invented a pill that cured cancer, I can assure you that I wouldn’t try to force it down your throat via legislation, regulation or some other governmental mandate.

After my early career as a newspaperman writing about government, politics and the way those intersect the corporate world, I have a distaste for almost all mandates. You can argue with me if you like, but I have set my stakes in the ground and am watching the rain outside my tent.

So why the heck would someone like me buy a SawStop table saw? After all, the company has been working quite successfully to make its technology de rigueur on all table saws via legal and political channels. (And to be fair, many of the other machinery manufacturers have been working just as hard on the other side of the issue in the political and legislative world. There are no good guys or bad guys in this debate.)

SawStop’s methods and my methods are not the same. I have always been the kind of person who bristles when someone tries to force-feed me anything, even if it’s good for me.

So here is why I broke down and bought a SawStop cabinet saw last week: It is the safest table saw on the market.

After witnessing some close calls during the last decade (I’ve not had one myself, really), I keep thinking what my life would be like without a finger or two. I would type slower. I would have more difficulty handling my hand tools. It would feel different to put my hand behind my wife’s head and kiss her.

So $3,000 is an awfully small one-time price to pay for an incredible added layer of protection. I don’t care about the “cost to society” in my own case. I can afford to pay for my own amputation and rehabilitation. But then what? Do I want to live with an amputation I could have easily avoided?

No, I do not.

Don’t be misled, the SawStop technology isn’t perfect. It can go off when you have pockets of wet glue in a lamination. It might misfire if the cartridge is set too close to the blade for some strange reason. And when it goes off, you are out of the cost of a cartridge and perhaps a sawblade. But really, ask yourself this:

1. Is a finger worth $67 (the price of a misfired cartridge)?

2. Is a finger worth $3,000 (the price of a SawStop 3hp cabinet saw)?

3. Aren’t sawblades really disposable items when compared to fingers?

I answered those above questions by purchasing a SawStop. I paid full retail, plus tax and shipping. If you think that the SawStop company would ever cut me a deal (or that I would even ask for a discount), then you haven’t been reading my stuff long enough.

The new saw arrived Wednesday, and it is sitting next to my soon-to-be-obsolete Unisaw.

The Unisaw has served me unerringly for more than 12 years. I have never had a close call with it. I have kept the guard on it whenever I could. In fact, I have an aftermarket splitter installed on it now.

But that is not enough once you have crossed over. Once I realized how easy it would be for my left hand to slip forward on the cast-iron table of my Unisaw, I unplugged the machine and turned my back on it forever.

Should you?

I think that in 50 years or so, this discussion will be moot. All saws will have flesh-detecting technology. If you don’t think I’m right, dig deeply into the history of automobile safety technology and decide for yourself.

Until then, I’m going to keep my SawStop, keep my fingers and keep my head buried in the sand when it comes to the politics of table saws.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. I have disabled the comments on this post. I have no desire to hear the same histrionics that pollute the message boards.

The Art of Asking Questions

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Steve Ramsey of the “Woodworking for Mere Mortals” web site asked me to contribute an entry to his “inspiration project,” where woodworkers try to describe things that inspire.

I am no good at these things. When people ask me what inspires me, I stutter, spit and make no sense whatsoever.

Thanks to Jeff Burks and Peter Follansbee, I came up with a better answer to the question.

Jeff Burks pointed out the incredible “Art of Asking Questions” essays from the late 19th century. I have read them about 10 times now.

Peter Follansbee took me to the newly discovered joiner’s shop in Duxbury, Mass., which left me speechless, asking questions.

Together they are a document of what keeps me in the shop, in the library, at my keyboard.

Thanks to Steve Ramsey for asking me to participate.

— Christopher Schwarz

Left to my Own Devices

Posted on by Lost Art Press

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Nearly all of the workbenches I’ve built have been in other people’s shops – those that belonged to a school, a friend or an employer. So I’ve always worked with the tools they had. Or I worked under some artificial pretense – building a bench with only hand tools or a certain budget or a time limit.

In fact, I’ve never built an entire workbench in my own dang shop on my own terms.

That fact occurred to me as I was driving home some legs with a sledgehammer. Yes, a sledge. That’s what I prefer to use to drive workbench joints. But when outside of my shop I rarely have one (I usually leave it in my other sledgy pants), and so I make do with mallets, gravity or (no lie) cinder blocks.

What else is different in my shop? The through-mortises in the benchtop. I have cut these every way imaginable, from all-chisel, all-ibuprofen, all-the-time to a Mafell chainsaw mortiser.

In my shop, I take a three-stage approach that works well for me. I bore out most of the waste with an auger. Then I bust up the waste with an electric jigsaw. Using the jigsaw, I kerf all the walls down to my knife lines. The kerfs serve as a guide for my chisel. When the kerfs are chiseled away from the inside of the mortise, the wall is plumb or undercut. Period. End of story.

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Today I cut all the mortises for my French oak workbench using this method. Within two hours I was driving the legs in with a sledge. The legs were going to go in on the first test-fit. No lie. Then I thought better of it. After all, getting the legs out of the mortises is much harder.

So I came upstairs and wrote this blog entry.

— Christopher Schwarz